Website Visitor Tracking

[marknc]

If anybody is looking for a tracker to montior visitors to their website I can certainly recommend the Advance Logger at http://perlonline.com/ . It is extemely comprehensive, easy to install and doesn't require log files. I have looked quite extensively and this is the best I've found.
Mark

[Tony Moore]

Thanks for the tip Mark

[george]

Is there one place you can put their script so it appears on every page? And have you got the paid for version?

[Ravon]

Hi, if you just enter the javascript in your primary template.
This is located in Design | Options | Layout | Actinic original primary template

The script will be added to all your pages.

I'm using the pro version and i'm very pleased with it.

Regards

[george]

I've just purchased and installed Advance Logger. I found the installation and configuration a bit tricky but its up and running now.

And its looking interesting, the `Referrer` page is quite revealing...

[Tony Moore]

Coincidentally just got mine up and running with a lot of help from my ISP. Looks very useful, i'm impressed so far.

Tony

[george]

The perlonline people install it for you if you wish. They need your website access details though. Change password after installation! Okay for £16ish.

[Josie]

We have installed this now and it is great. Also had a bit of trickery setting up due to resetting permissions but now it is installed it's running fine and contains a lot more information on our visitors than our usual logs provided by our ISP.

We are also very impressed at the support - we had a query and emailed it to the support team who got back to us with a clear answer within half an hour. Really not bad at all for $35 (including $5.24 tax).

We originally put the javascript code only on our pages outside of Actinic and the acatalog index page so that we could test it for a few days. Today we put it at the bottom of the primary template, the extended info template, the search results template (which gives us the search words as well as all the rest of the info) and the receipt page (to track orders). We are testing the feasibility of putting it on Act_order00, 1, 2 etc. What have other users done?

When we emailed our query, we said that we were impressed with the software and the reply was 'please tell all of your friends about us' - so now we have!

[george]

I agree with Josie, I had a few emails to and from their support, very quick in replying.

Where did you put the script in the search page results Josie, I never thought of that!

One small niggle, and it is a small one is that you can set it to `ignore` your own viewing using your IP address(es). My most used pc seems to have a fixed ip, where a couple of others I use the IP changes constantly (not sure why this is) so you cannot set it to ignore them. A very minor niggle tho...

Your very own Big Brother!

[christopherpm]

It looks very nice, but there is also a free piece of software called "AXS Visitor Tracking System" and is available for download at http://www.xav.com. Dead easy to install and use, a large range of options to view such as visitor IP, domain name etc.., date / times / days of visits, keywords searched for in search engines (and where you ranked on that serach)... and much more.

Plus they also have other free scripts such as Guardian which is used for creating "Error" pages to repalce the usual IE "Page not found" errors etc....

[Josie]

Yes we are currently having that niggle as our IP address changes every day. But as you say, only a small niggle.

On every page that I put the script, I've put it at the bottom, just before the </body> tag so I can easily find it. I've put it in the Act_SearchTemplate.html for the search page.

I wanted to put it on the search results but then realised that this would mean it potentially could appear 20 times on the same page, which we don't want! So I noticed that the search template (ie the advanced search box) appears at the bottom of the search results as well as when a user clicks 'search'. Most people use the quicksearch now anyway.

I've tested it and it gives the full page title (ie. http://csbooks.co.uk/cgi-bin/ss000001.pl?SS=dalton jugs&ACTION=Go%21&PR=-1&TB=A&SHOP= ) which includes the search term used. And this is logged whether or not there are any results. So I'm wondering now whether the search template uses the primary template and so the javascript is appearing anyway? Oh well, we are still testing. We already know the search terms used as we are using the searchword.log (I think this is in the advanced user guide) and it is very useful, but it will be interesting now we have advlogger to see if the user is successful in their search and goes on to view the page. Previously we have only been able to judge this if they have actually ordered a book. Big Brother indeed!

Shucks that we've paid for something that we could have got for free but at least there is good support with this product, you never know with the freeware, do you?

[george]

I've been investigating this. I only have the script on the Primary templates. If you go to the `Pages` listing, you'll find the cgi-bin/ss000002.pl one, if you click on the link it brings up a list of the activity...

[jxm28788]

Is this utility any good for showing you the most popular pages, and the most popular keywords and key phrases?

I've found webaliser and analog are rubbish at these, the reports on the top 'requests' or 'top 30 URLs' are all of the gif/jpg files (eg. the nav buttons!) which is not a fat lot of use; analog only does keywords not key phrases; webalizer does do key phrases but on by month, with no 'all time' option.

Also, these packages work on a month by month basis, but I need something that can give me a summary of all info from day 1 to current as well.

What I need is basically a list of the key phrases used, and a list of the html pages that get the most hits. websitestats was good at this but, as per a previous thread, the server is slow and based in the US and it was killing my page load times.

so can this perl thing do this? or, given that this thread is 4 years old(!), are there any better stats packages out now? (and yes I looked at AXS but the demo didn't seem to have anything on keywords...?)

[pinbrook]

AWstats or Google Analytics

[wjcampbe]

Sawmill can do all time, but the database gets quite large so I tend to archive each year. I find the last 3/6/9 month trend more informative than what happened two years ago.